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    65．What might be talked about if the passage is continued? A．Listing how the government is wasting taxes. B．Presenting people’s feelings against the government’s wasting taxes. C．Giving suggestion to help the government solve the financial problem. D．The government’s taking some steps to stop wasting taxes. C We may all have had the embarrassing moment: Getting half-way through a story only to realize that we’ve told this exact tale before, to the person we’re boring with it now. Why do we make such memory mistakes? According to research published in Psychological Science, it may have to do with the way our brains process different types of memory. Researchers Nigel Gopie, of the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto, and Colin Macleod, of the University of Waterloo, divided memory into two kinds. The first was source memory, or the ability to keep track of where information is coming from. The second was destination memory, or the ability to recall who we have given information to. They found that source memory functions better than destination memory, in part because of the direction in which that information is travelling. To study the differences between source and destination memory, the researchers did an experiment on 60 university students, according to a New York Times report. The students were asked to associate 50 random facts with the faces of 50 famous people. Half of the students "told" each fact to one of the faces, reading it aloud when the celebrity's picture appeared on a computer screen. The other half read each fact silently and saw a different celebrity picture afterward. When later asked to recall which facts went with which faces, the students who were giving information out scored about 16 percent lower on memory performance compared with the students receiving information . The researchers concluded that out-going information was less associated with its environmental context ---- that is, the person ---- than was incoming information. This makes sense given what is known about attention. A person who is giving information, even little facts, will devote some mental resources to thinking about what is being said. Because our attention is finite, we give less attention to the person we are giving information to. After a second experiment with another group of 40 students, the researchers concluded that self-focus is another factor that undermines destination memory. They asked half the students to continue giving out random information, while the other told things about themselves. This time around, those who were talking about themselves did 15 percent worse than those giving random information. "When you start telling these personal facts compared with non-self facts, suddenly destination memory goes down more, suggesting that it is the self-focus component that's reducing the memory, Gopie told Live Science. 【查看更多】

     

    题目列表(包括答案和解析)

    Almost a decade ago, the federal government dropped $10 million for an Earth-monitoring satellite that never made it into space. Today it sits in a closet in Maryland. Cost to taxpayers for storing it: $1 million a year. And that's just what's hiding in one closet. Who knows what's in the rest of them?
    Because we think the government should be held to at least the same standards as a publicly traded company, and because as taxpayers, we're America's shareholders, we performed an audit （财务检查）of sorts of the federal books. We're not economists, but we do have common sense. We tried to get help from Congressional staffers from both parties, as well as various watchdog groups and agencies. In the end, we found that the federal government wastes nearly $1 trillion every year.
    That's roughly equal to the amount collected annually by the Internal Revenue Service in personal income taxes. Put another way, it's also equal to about one-third of the country's $2.9 trillion total annual budget. And reclaiming that lost trillion could help wipe out the country's annual budget deficit（赤字）, improve education, and provide health insurance for those who don't have it.
    So how do you define "waste"? David Walker of the Government Accountability Office (GAO), a federal watchdog agency, calls it "the government's failure to give taxpayers the most for their money." For our part, we used the kind of household test you would use on a piece of meat sitting in your refrigerator: If it smells rotten, it's waste. Our government regularly pays for products and services it never gets, wildly overpays companies to do things it could do more cheaply itself, loses money outright due to lax（不严格的）accounting and oversight, and spends money randomly on unnecessary programs.
    How exactly does the federal government waste your hard-earned tax dollars? We've identified what we consider ten of the worst ways.
    【小题1】The underlined sentence in Paragraph1 really means        .

    A．there are many other closetsB．there are some other satellites
    C．there is something else in the closetsD．the waste may be quite amazing
    【小题2】Which of the following can best describe the feeling of the author?
    A．Annoyed.B．Calm.C．Surprised.D．Not concerned.
    【小题3】Which of the following statements may be right?
    A．The country’s annual budget is usually decided by the public.
    B．The government failed in launching the satellite.
    C．The government is only wasting money in space experiments.
    D．The amount collected annually in personal income taxes is equal to the country’s budget.
    【小题4】The best title for the passage would be        .
    A．Protecting Our Rights!
    B．Our Country Is In Danger!
    C．The Government Is Wasting Our Tax Dollars!
    D．How to Prevent Government from Wasting Money!
    【小题5】What might be talked about if the passage is continued?
    A．The government’s taking some steps to stop wasting taxes.
    B．Presenting people’s feelings against the government’s wasting taxes.
    C．Giving suggestion to help the government solve the financial problem.
    D．Listing how the government is wasting taxes.

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    Almost a decade ago, the federal government dropped $10 million for an Earth-monitoring satellite that never made it into space. Today it sits in a closet in Maryland. Cost to taxpayers for storing it: $1 million a year. And that's just what's hiding in one closet. Who knows what's in the rest of them?

    Because we think the government should be held to at least the same standards as a publicly traded company, and because as taxpayers, we're America's shareholders, we performed an audit （财务检查）of sorts of the federal books. We're not economists, but we do have common sense. We tried to get help from Congressional staffers from both parties, as well as various watchdog groups and agencies. In the end, we found that the federal government wastes nearly $1 trillion every year.

    That's roughly equal to the amount collected annually by the Internal Revenue Service in personal income taxes. Put another way, it's also equal to about one-third of the country's $2.9 trillion total annual budget. And reclaiming that lost trillion could help wipe out the country's annual budget deficit（赤字）, improve education, and provide health insurance for those who don't have it.

    So how do you define "waste"? David Walker of the Government Accountability Office (GAO), a federal watchdog agency, calls it "the government's failure to give taxpayers the most for their money." For our part, we used the kind of household test you would use on a piece of meat sitting in your refrigerator: If it smells rotten, it's waste. Our government regularly pays for products and services it never gets, wildly overpays companies to do things it could do more cheaply itself, loses money outright due to lax（不严格的）accounting and oversight, and spends money randomly on unnecessary programs.

    How exactly does the federal government waste your hard-earned tax dollars? We've identified what we consider ten of the worst ways.

    1.The underlined sentence in Paragraph1 really means         .

    A．there are many other closets     B．there are some other satellites

    C．there is something else in the closets    D．the waste may be quite amazing

    2.Which of the following can best describe the feeling of the author?

        A．Annoyed.       B．Calm.          C．Surprised.     D．Not concerned.

    3.Which of the following statements may be right?

        A．The country’s annual budget is usually decided by the public.

        B．The government failed in launching the satellite.

        C．The government is only wasting money in space experiments.

        D．The amount collected annually in personal income taxes is equal to the country’s budget.

    4.The best title for the passage would be         .

        A．Protecting Our Rights!          

        B．Our Country Is In Danger!

        C．The Government Is Wasting Our Tax Dollars!

        D．How to Prevent Government from Wasting Money!

    5.What might be talked about if the passage is continued?

        A．The government’s taking some steps to stop wasting taxes.

        B．Presenting people’s feelings against the government’s wasting taxes.

        C．Giving suggestion to help the government solve the financial problem.

        D．Listing how the government is wasting taxes.

     

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